Chen Liang's Homepage

I'm a research scientist at Meta (previously known as Facebook) in the ads core ML team working on ads ranking personalization. I conduct research on user modeling to improve ads ranking model performance. Before joining Meta, I obtained my Ph.D. from the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, under the supervision of Prof. C. Lee Giles. Before that, I received my Bachelor degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University in 2013.

I'm passionate about applied machine learning. During my Ph.D. study, I developed machine learning methods for building educational applications. Specifically, I worked on concept prerequisite learning, fill-in-the-blank question generation, and computer-facilitated book creation. Please check out these projects to learn more.

Selected Publications [Full List]

[EMNLP] Measuring Prerequisite Relations Among Concepts
Chen Liang, Zhaohui Wu, Wenyi Huang, and C. Lee Giles.
In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2015.
[Data] [Poster]
[EDM] Active Learning of Strict Partial Orders: A Case Study on Concept Prerequisite Relations
Chen Liang, Jianbo Ye, Han Zhao, Bart Pursel, and C. Lee Giles
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, 2019.
[Data][Supplemental Material][arXiv version]
[AAAI] Investigating Active Learning for Concept Prerequisite Learning
Chen Liang, Jianbo Ye, Shuting Wang, Bart Pursel, and C. Lee Giles
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2018.
[Data][Slides]
[AAAI] Recovering Concept Prerequisite Relations from University Course Dependencies
Chen Liang, Jianbo Ye, Zhaohui Wu, Bart Pursel, and C. Lee Giles
In Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2017.
[Data]
[BEA] Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions Using Learning to Rank
Chen Liang, Xiao Yang, Neisarg Dave, Drew Wham, Bart Pursel, and C. Lee Giles
In Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Application, 2018.
[Code][Data][Poster]
[AAAI] BBookX: Building Online Open Books for Personalized Learning
Chen Liang, Shuting Wang, Zhaohui Wu, Kyle Williams, Bart Pursel, Benjamin Brautigam, Sherwyn Saul, Hannah Williams, Kyle Bowen, and C. Lee Giles.
In Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2016. (Demo paper)
[AAAI] A Neural Probabilistic Model for Context Based Citation Recommendation
Wenyi Huang, Zhaohui Wu, Chen Liang, Prasenjit Mitra, and C. Lee Giles.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2015.
[CVPR] Multi-scale FCN with Cascaded Instance Aware Segmentation for Arbitrary Oriented Word Spotting In The Wild
Dafang He, Xiao Yang, Chen Liang, Zihan Zhou, Alexander G Ororbia, Daniel Kifer, and C. Lee Giles
In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2017.

Patents

Systems and methods for news event organization. US9817908B2. Nov 14, 2017.

Professional Services

Program Committee

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): 2019
Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA): 2020, 2019, 2018

Reviewer

2020: BEA, CHI
2019: BEA, ACL
2018: BEA

Sub-reviewer

2017: WWW, L@S, DocEng
2016: AAAI, WWW, IJCAI
2015: ASONAM, DocEng, TPDL

Misc

I maintained a list of papers on concept prerequisite learning, selected from AI/NLP conferences. PRs are welcome!
Keyword extraction demo: Sina Weibo Keyword (Collaborators: Zhiyuan Liu, Xinxiong Chen, Jiayu Tang), as of 2013 we have more than 3.5 million registered users.